A cleaning robot is an autonomous cleaning apparatus that sucks foreign substances such as dusts from the floor while traveling an area to be cleaned without user's control.
The cleaning robot needs to search for a station for recharging and dock to the station to recharge. If the cleaning robot fails to recognize an accurate position of the station, the operation of the cleaning robot may stop due to decreased battery power caused by the failure in finding the station. Thus, research has been conducted on docking methods of cleaning robots to stations by accurately find positions of the stations.
Currently, IR sensor-based docking methods, LIDAR pattern recognition-based docking methods, and image sensor-based docking methods have been widely applied to cleaning robots as docking methods. However, if a cleaning robot located at a remote position from a station cannot recognize a guide signal of the station, the cleaning robot may perform normal docking to the station.